interview

Mirabai Bush is the director of The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Based in Massachusetts, its mission is to bring contemplative practice into mainstream institutional life. Corporations, media organizations, law schools, and universities have sponsored programs directed by the Center.
Prior to co-founding the Center in 1996, Bush was the director of the Guatemala Project and the Compassionate Action Project for Seva Foundation. A Buddhist practitioner for the past thirty years, she is also co-author, with Ram Dass, of Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service.
This interview was conducted in New York City by Helen Tworkov in March 2001.What was the initial motivation behind the Center for Contemplative Mind?
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On September 5, 2001, monk, scholar, and political figure Samdhong Rinpoche became the first democratically elected chairman of the Tibetan Cabinet-in-Exile. He polled more than 85 percent of the total votes cast by Tibetans around the world. Born in 1939 in Jol village in the eastern Tibetan province of Kham, Samdhong Rinpoche fled Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1959. He lives in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. He was interviewed in early July by Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen during a visit to New York City.
As the first elected leader of the Tibetan Cabinet-in-Exile, what challenges do you face?
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A poet and Zen student, Chase Twichell is a recipient of awards from the Artists Foundation (Boston), the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has written five volumes of poetry, the latest of which are The Snow Watcher and The Ghost of Eden. Twichell has taught widely, most recently at Princeton University. In 1999 she left Princeton to found Ausable Press, which publishes poetry and poetry-related prose that “investigates and expresses human consciousness in language that goes where prose cannot.” She lives in upstate New York.
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At the age of fourteen, Steve Young, a Jewish kid growing up in Los Angeles, saw a samurai movie. It triggered in him an interest in Japanese culture and language that eventually led to his enrollment in an alternative school system for Japanese-American children. From then on, he grew up “bilingual and bicultural.” When he reached high school, to deepen his understanding of Japanese culture, Young felt he needed to understand its Chinese influences, so his parents hired a Mandarin language tutor. When he learned of the influence of Indian culture on Chinese culture by way of Buddhism, he moved on to Sanskrit, and asked his parents for another tutor.
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Ram Dass’s books and lectures have been an inspiration to many people. Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert, Harvard professor and longtime friend of Timothy Leary’s) is responsible for turning on many in the West to Eastern religious ideas and is the author of such spiritual classics as Be Here Now; The Only Dance There Is; and Journey of Awakening. He created the Hanuman Foundation to spread spiritually directed social action in the West and co-founded the Seva Foundation, an international service organization working on public health and social justice issues, which has made major progress in combating blindness in India and Nepal.
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His Holiness the Twelfth Gyalwang Drukpa is the head of the Drukpa School of Tibetan Buddhism, one of Tibet’s great practice lineages, and is a renowned master of the Mahamudra and Dzogchen lineages. He has monasteries and nunneries in India and Nepal, as well as centers in Europe and Mexico. This is his first interview in ten years. Lama Surya Das, a Western Dzogchen teacher, taught English to the Gyalwang Drukpa at His Holiness’s monastery in Darjeeling, India, in the early seventies. Lama Surya Das is the founder of the Dzogchen Center and author of numerous books, most recently Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be: Lessons on Change, Loss and Spiritual Transformation. This conversation took place at Lama Surya’s hermitage and sanctuary, Dzogchen Osel Ling, outside Austin, Texas, last November.
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